Google Inc. unveiled Wednesday a beta version of its search engine for Weblogs, more commonly known as blogs.

The company, which first jumped into the online journal market in 2003 with its buyout of popular hosting service Blogger, said that it launched the search tool in an effort to spur continued growth of the blogging phenomenon. Technorati, a blog search site that will compete with Google's offering, currently lists over 17 million sites and 1.5 billion links in its own index, up from only 100,000 sites two years ago.

The beta site retains Google's traditional clean presentation and offers an advanced search function that allows users to focus their queries on blogs related to specific titles or authors. The tool also gives people the ability to search on blog posts written within a certain timeframe, or to filter out sites containing objectionable language. The blog search promises to list pages written in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese, among other languages.

Google said the tool will eventually aim to include every blog worldwide that publishes a site feed via RSS or Atom technology, regardless of what company or service is hosting the pages. The company will soon offer a method for people to manually add sites not already picked up by its index and said that it will also respect the privacy of blogs that do not offer feeds.

A quick query aimed at a popular blog topic such as politics garners over 500,000 individual results, while a search around something more specific such as iPod battery life finds roughly 8,000 links. Unsurprisingly, well over 400,000 pages have already been indexed regarding the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Despite pledging that it remains a "strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging," and that it hopes the new search tool may "inspire many to join the revolution themselves," Google has also established its belief that there should be limits to people's online descriptions. A former Google employee, Mark Jen, left the firm only several weeks after the search giant asked him to remove some controversial comments he had made about the firm in his own blog.

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